9/16/2008 @ 4:00PM

Transcript: Lessons From Racing

Racing champion Sir Jackie Stewart has served as an engineering consultant for Ford, sat on the board at Moet & Chandon and owned a Formula One team. He recently wrote his autobiography, Winning Is Not Enough.

In an interview with Forbes.com, Stewart explained how racing prepared him for life as a businessman.

I think sports are a very good developer of people. Because there are a lot of naturally gifted sports people, men and women, and it’s usually a gift of God–you know, just natural ability that they are blessed with. The really good ones, though, have got to have something which I call “mind management.”

Because then, after you win a few, you then start to grow and see that there is so much more to doing it than just living with that natural gift, naturally doing something well–but to finesse it, to manicure it, to massage it up to a higher level. You start using the brain.

The ones who are truly successful are the ones who have really used their heads and the mind management program. Because of risk management, because in my day, when I was driving racing cars, there was a two-out-of-three chance I was going to die, for example, over a five-year window of time. You had to remove the downside risks. Remove the unnecessary hazards, which is no different from a business decision.

So a sports person is very well-trained on the basis of trying to win, not only for himself or herself, but also for the team. And in the case of motor racing, you’ve got an awful lot of people behind you–mechanics and engineers, designers, electronics people, all sorts of experts in the field, whether it’s tires, gearboxes, engines or anything, even aerodynamics. And they all depend on you.

So therefore you’ve got to learn to live in a team environment to be able to achieve. Because if, let’s say, at 2 p.m. on a Sunday, if you are driving a Grand Prix car when the lights go out and you go, that whole investment of that team and those people. There’s about, in a normal Formula One team, anything between 80 to 100 people looking after two sort of prima donna racing drivers. It’s all on the shoulders of that driver, that whole team effort. So you’ve got to deliver.

I’ve got a saying: “You’ve got to make it happen.” I think that’s important.

Human relationships are fantastic to have, and if you have them in business it means that you are both gaining from the experience. They should feel like they are getting more than they are paying for; you should feel that you are more rewarded than you are supplying.

And, I suppose, attention to detail. Being a dyslexic, I’m not really good at very much, but I’m very good at attention to detail. And that’s what’s carried me through my life, that attention to detail` and the human relationships that I’ve been able to service and develop, if you like.

So I don’t think sports are any different. I don’t think anything else is any different. Family, or anything else, and neither is business. So these would be my little rules.